Thursday, 13 December 2012

IBM announced this week that it has developed a scalable, silicon nanophotonics chip to improve communications and processing for big data centers.
The chips use pulses of light to communicate between chips in
servers, racks and supercomputers. With the new system in place, IBM’s
chip can exceed next-gen standard data transfers of 25 Gbps.
These speeds are possible because the optical components on same chip
as the processors. The processors still use electrical circuits, but
the chips convert the electrical information to light pulses, which then
transfer between chips. Upon arriving at a new chip, the light is then
transformed into electricity again to be processed.
“We’re basically attacking a fundamental problem,” lead scientist Dr.
Solomon Assefa told me. “Communication in computing systems. For
example, look at how search is done. When someone queries, it goes to a
big data center. It doesn’t just go to a single processor. You have to
connect many racks and processors.”
The key innovation isn’t just the technology, though. It’s the fact
that its commercial and scalable. The research team at IBM developed the
chip so that it can be scaled using conventional manufacturing
processes, which is what they’ve been working on for the past two years
since their initial breakthrough.
“So they will be cheap,” said Assefa. “Especially if you compare them
to what already exists, which requires more assembly of complex parts.
We’re bringing cost of optics down to silicon level.”